Environmentalism as Religion

While people have worshipped many things, we may be the first to build shrines to garbage.

By

Paul H. Rubin

Updated April 22, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Many observers have made the point that environmentalism is eerily close to a religious belief system, since it includes creation stories and ideas of original sin. But there is another sense in which environmentalism is becoming more and more like a religion: It provides its adherents with an identity.

Scientists are understandably uninterested in religious stories because they do not meet the basic criterion for science: They cannot be tested. God may or may not have created the world—there is no way of knowing, although...